


Running On Empty

by philomel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Driving, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philomel/pseuds/philomel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean waits for the other boot to fall.</p><p><span class="small">Set vaguely pre-4.20.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	Running On Empty

_Just a little longer._

The road disappears ahead of them in the darkness and the Kinks are on the radio, saying they’re gonna die on Dead End Street. Dean doesn’t like the way it sounds like a prediction now, a prophecy.

Fact is, that two room apartment Ray Davies keeps bitching about sounds like a benediction compared to what Dean and Sam have. But the chorus still holds. It’s hard to see past the foreboding of it.

Dean doesn't know what to do with this feeling. This dread that says: the bottom will drop out soon, the other boot will fall. Soon. The clock is ticking. Metaphors spool out, not like thread but like bowels spilling out of your gut. (Dean's been there; he knows.) They are apt, these metaphors, but so far from adequate. The people who said them have no concept of real Hell. The people who say them hardly know what's real, what _should_ be dreaded.

The thing is, the Hell he left behind? With its blood and its red-raw pain and its thrill, it falls so far short of the tiny little everyday hell he now lives in that it's almost a joke. A comic montage of bright butchery, exaggerated grins torn wide and pratfalls on entrails. He even remembers laughing. Laughing and laughing.

That joke isn't funny anymore. He forced a grin through it, set himself to his task, determined. For Sam's sake.

Because Sam lived, Dean offered up his soul, piece by piece. Literally and figuratively — no separation existed in Hell.

But Dean miscalculated.

His only fault was not that he sold his soul, but figuring that selling his soul would save Sam.

If it saved him, he no longer knows how much it saved. Just enough to get by? Just portions of him? Dean sees the shape of Sam: the meat of him much the same, maybe a little gray at the edges, pushing past prime. But the underneath parts shift, move beneath the meat like maggots. Everything's fine on the surface until a little twitch, a little sliver of white gives away the decay. One clipped word, one cutting glance from Sam rends Dean faster and skewers him deeper than any torture down in the pit. It leaves him feeling turned inside out. (Alastair did that too; Dean knows it for more than metaphor.)

Dean wants to believe Sam is still in there, intact, unchanged. But he isn't sure, doesn't _know_. And that doubt eats away at his hope, chews his belief down to scrap.

Reason tells him of course, _of course_ Sam would change. He lost his brother. Dean remembers what that's like. But he thought... he didn't think, he _assumed_ Sam would be okay. Sam was always a good kid. The smart one, the one with all the potential. Dean imagined that potential could be realized once he was no longer standing in Sam's way. He thought: _be a hunter, be a lawyer, be_ both, _Sammy — if anyone could do it, you could._ So Sam would mourn, but Sam would move on. Change for the better.

Since Hell, "better" isn't quite what it used to be.

If Sam is a better hunter than before, it's because he's worse at being Sam. Dean grieves for his brother, the doe-eyed kid with the tender heart. The boy who cried over spilt blood. This Sam, he apes Dean. Dean sees it, the carelessness slung over his shoulders, the single-minded determination shadowing over the ridge of his brow. It's familiar, but it's a mockery. Dean admits it sometimes, to himself, _sometimes_ : he cares, he's always cared. It was just easier not to let it in. Let it tag along but don't acknowledge it. Sam, though, Sam's tossed that care to the curb. He's disowned it. Sam's disowned himself.

As far as Dean's concerned, it's that simple. But it's not simple. Not at all.

There are times — driving down the road, mostly — when he can forget. Sam's by his side, as present as any of Dean's limbs, as constant as the breath in and out of his lungs. But Dean has taken all of those things for granted, and paid the price. Still, he holds on to the hope that he catches in Sam in those moments.

When he's sleeping, Sam looks the same as before, the same as ever. Nose pressed against the window, the tip of it angling away from the cartilage, Sam _now_ mirrors Sam _then_. In Dean's mind, the lines recede from Sam's face, the hair shortens, his frame diminishes into less muscle, lankier limbs. He thinks about going back all the time now, ever since Cas took him back before he was born. But before that, too, Dean wondered what it would've been like if he had never shown up at Stanford, dragging his shit luck behind him like a duffel. Probably that bastard Yellow Eyes would have gotten to Sammy anyway. But what if he hadn’t? What if Dad could have done it without them? What if Sam could have been left alone? No second fire to raze all attempts at normal life to the ground. No demons at his doorstep, other than the fading memories of childhood ones. Sammy'd know better, but maybe, _maybe_ one day he could have convinced himself that the bogeyman wasn't real. Like any grownup, shedding his kid fears like an invisible skin, Sam could've let it fall behind him. Maybe even the demon blood would have weakened over time, dormant as a warhead that never saw battle.

It's such a lie. Dean knows it. He tells himself these lies every once in a while anyway. It's like comfort food. Sometimes he needs pie; sometimes he needs to pretend that Sam could have ever had a normal life. He likes to picture it: something like what the djinn showed him, but flickering into the future like a movie montage. Sam, Jess, a blur of kids running through a sprinkler in the yard, newspapers and a dog to catch each one with its tail wagging. If he's going to pretend, he's going to go hog wild: June and Ward fucking Cleaver. And Dean and Dad? They might as well not exist. A fairy tale Sam can tell his kids when they're old enough for scary stories, maybe too old to believe anymore.

It never would have happened. Life doesn't work that way for them. But even Winchesters need dreams. Of course they do, when they walk daily through a world of waking nightmares. It desensitizes you, that constancy, but it doesn't take the nightmares away. So Dean'll take whatever dreams he can get, thank you. Even if they're only vanilla fantasies, _safe_ — safely fantasized while Sam's sleeping and Dean's awake.

Sometimes, like these times, Dean can still watch over his little brother, and pretend he's not doing a shitty job of it. Just the two of them, on the road, rumbling through the night, everywhere they've been fading fast behind them.

But where have they been that they won't be again?

Dean pulls off, past the shoulder, tries to sleep with the darkness closing in all around them, its fingers pressed against the windows, wind shaking the car like soft laughter. He leaves the radio on, a block of the Stones mocking him with songs of the Devil and the sun blotted out from the sky. But it's familiar; it's all familiar.

His gaze falls on Sam as he hears: _I could not foresee this thing happening to you._ And he thinks:

Stop it here. Hold it at bay. Just a little longer.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta: zelda-zee.


End file.
